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The Spectacle of the Besieged City: Repurposing Cultural Memory in Leningrad, 1941–1944

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Polina Barskova
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Abstract

Focusing on less studied areas of the twentieth-century war experience, this article investigates the notions of “urban beauty” and “urban spec-Slavic Review 69, no. 2 (Summer 2010) tacle” as experienced by the residents of besieged Leningrad. Polina Barskova suggests that, via an estrangement effect, the siege gaze replaces the unrepresentable traumatic experience of presentnesswith an aestheticized cultural past containing such useable notions of cultural memory as ruin, stage set, monument, and frame. This replacement can be described as a siege urbanscape sublime, a sublime lying not in the distinction between the horrific and the beautiful but rather in the observer's tendency to substitute the horrific with the beautiful. This particular species of sublime aims at psychological anesthesia and is thoroughly oxymoronic: the intense clashing of opposites—to the point that oxymoronic sensibility leads to rhetorical confluence—alerts us to the connection between the aesthetic discourse of besieged Leningrad and the perennial Petersburg text, thus opening new opportunities for the study of the functioning of cultural memory in Soviet society.

Type
Siege of Leningrad Revisited: Narrative, Image, Self
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 69 , Issue 2 , Summer 2010 , pp. 327 - 355
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2010

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References

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14. Nikitin expresses this anxiety with particular poignancy: “My notebook is full; I managed to put only eight days in it. Still I write, to my own amazement, as if obsessed. Does any of my writing make sense? Some day all this might be useful as material, a meticulous, scrupulous analysis of the air of an irreproducable epoch: everything is forgotten, and the little details evaporate. I write in detail, immediately following events; if I don't write things down the same day, I find that a lot gets lost forever.” Nikitin, “Blokadnyi dnevnik,“138.

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16. Many diarists note the citizens’ intensified movement: it is “slow” and “silent,“ yet “epic” in its scale. See Nikitin, “Blokadnyi dnevnik,” 89; Georgii Lebedev, “Blokadnyi dnevnik,” 10 April 1942, manuscript, Gosudarstvennyi Russkii muzei, Otdel rukopisei (GRMOR),f. 100, op. 484.

17. Iurii Kolosov, interview, St. Petersburg, 1 July 2008.

18. Neratova, Vdni voiny, 97.

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20. Elena Martilla, “Dnevnik,” manuscript, GRM OR, f. 100, op. 570. For additional information on Martilla and her artistic activity during the siege, see Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, eds., Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women's Diaries, Memoirs, andDocumentary Prose (Pittsburgh, 2002), 177–283; Jones, Michael, Leningrad: State of Siege (New York, 2008), 142-73.Google Scholar

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24. Diarists often remark upon the dehumanization of death in besieged Leningrad. “This was such … non-human death. They looked like old dry brushwood or piles of planks—an icy mass frozen together. Nobody was horrified—people just ignored it, and if they did look at it—then without any feeling.” Neratova, V dni voiny, 69. As if in grim affirmation of Roman Jacobson's argument in “The Statue in Pushkin's Poetic Mythology” regarding the instability of the animate/inanimate opposition in The Bronze Horseman, the originating template for the Petersburg text, Iakov Rubanchik subtitles his drawing: “Everything was dead, except for the sentry lions standing on the front steps with upturned paws, as if alive.” Loviagina, V. E., ed., Blokadnyi dnevnik: Zhivopis’ i grafika blokadnogo vremeni (St. Petersburg, 2005), 144.Google Scholar

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29. Aleksandr Benois, “Zhivopisnyi Peterburg,” Mir iskusstva, no. 1 (1902): 2–4.

30. Ibid., 4.

31. The beautiful, dying city of the past endangered by the aggressive, unscrupulous present is a crucial concept in the problem of the symbolist city. See Hirsh, Sharon, “The Ideal City, the Dead City,” Symbolism and Modern Urban Society (Cambridge, Eng., 2004), 257-77, 322–25.Google Scholar

32. For analyses of the representational spectrum of “death of Petersburg” discourse, see E. Yudina, “Metropolis to Necropolis: The St. Petersburg Myth and Its Cultural Extension in the 1910s and 1920s” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1999); Kaganov, Grigorii, Sankt-Peterburg: Obmzy proslranslva (St. Petersburg, 2004), 177-79Google Scholar; Goscilo, Helena, “Unsaintly Petersburg? Visions and Visuals,” in Helena Goscilo and Stephen M. Norris, eds., Preserving Petersburg: History, Memory, Nostalgia (Bloomington, 2008), 57–88 Google Scholar; and Polina Barskova, “Piranesi in Petrograd: Sources, Strategies, and Dilemmas in Modernist Depictions of the Ruins (1918–1921),” Slavic Review) 65, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 694–712.

33. Kirschenbaum, Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 15.

34. Scholars have paid increasing attention to the intriguing problem of the “recycling“ of the experience of the first siege by the second; see, e.g., Rainbow, Aileen G., “The Siege of Leningrad: Wartime Literature and Ideological Change,” in Thurston, Robert W. and Bonwetsch, Bernd, eds., The People's War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (Urbana, 2000), 154-70Google Scholar; Kirschenbaum, Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 27–29.

35. Viktor Shklovskii, one of the sharpest and most compassionate observers of Petersburg spatiality in the twentieth century, notes in the 1920s: “Petersburg crawls to the outskirts and becomes a bagel-city with a beautiful but dead center.” Shklovskii, “60 dnei bez sluzhby,” Novyi LEE 1927, no. 6: 18. During the siege, he registers the opposite movement: “The city was taken in such a tight circle that it lost its outskirts.” Viktor Shklovskii, Tetiva: 0 neskhodstve skhodnogo (Moscow, 1970), 40. Shklovskii, who always had an eye for paradox, notes that while the 1930s saw the city's historical memory suppressed and replaced with new Soviet content, the siege again brought to light the city's historical center as well as its discursive centrality. This problem is discussed aptly by Cynthia Simmons, “Leningrad Culture under Siege (1941–1944),” in Goscilo and Norris, eds., Preserving Petersburg, 164–82. For a comprehensive and illuminating study of the fading of artistic diversity in 1930s Leningrad, Kagan, consult M. S., Istoriia kul'tury Peterburga (St. Petersburg, 2008), 275-89.Google Scholar

36. Boris Zagurskii, hkusstvo surovykh let (Leningrad, 1970), 85. The manuscript was indeed published, but only in 1974 and in such form as demonstrated the editors’ censoring zeal. See Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Avtobiograficheskiezapiski (Moscow, 1974). The original manuscript is held at the Rossiiskaia natsional'naia biblioteka, Otdel rukopisei, f. 1015.

37. Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, “Dnevnik,” in Suris, ed., Bol'she, chem vospominan'ia, 43.

38. Ibid., 44.

39. For a comprehensive summary of Ostroumova-Lebedeva's oeuvre, see Kiselev, M. F., Grafika A. P. Ostroumovoi-Lebedevoi; Graviura i akvarel’ (Moscow, 1984).Google Scholar

40. Toporov, Peterburgshii tekst, 26, 35.

41. For discussion of Ostroumova-Lebedeva as participant of the preservationist creation of the “static urbanscape” of Petersburg, see Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 61.

42. Inber, Vera, Pochti trigoda: Leningradskii dnevnik (Moscow, 1968), 279.Google Scholar

43. Diarists connect the siege's “frozen time” with its “frozen space.” Vsevolod Vishnevsky observes: “The frozen, quiet Neva. Quiet factory chimneys. On the nearest post we saw a poster: ‘Great Festivities—22 June 1941’ … As if time had frozen! We wanted to take the poster, but it had frozen to the post. Houses were empty, windows broken… . I constantly felt that everything had gone numb, that the landscape was dead.” Vsevolod Vishnevskii, Leningrad: Dnevniki voennykh let (Moscow, 2002), 90.

44. N. V. Lazareva, “Blokada,” Trudy gosudarstvennogo muzeia istorii Sankt-Peterburga, no. 5 (2000): 236. Tat'iana Glebova's diary provides a remarkable example of the past soothing the pain of the present: “Yesterday the air raid siren was on almost all night… . In order to fall asleep, I lull myself with cozy stories about how someone and I (the way we are, modern people) are somewhere out in the boondocks traveling by relay in a post carriage, in the time of Pushkin; we have dinner at an inn in front of a roaring fireplace in the company of people of that era, and it's terribly interesting to examine them up close.” Tat'iana Glebova, “Risovat’ kak letopisets: Stranitsy blokadnogo dnevnika,” Iskusstvo Leningrada, 1990, no. 1: 30. Another interesting example of rhetorical “consolation via the past” during the siege is the book of memoirs by Vladimir Konashevich, O sebe i o svoem dele (Moscow, 1968), in which the author interweaves two contrasting narratives—his “idyllic“ prerevolutionary childhood and the siege winter.

45. Zagurskii, Iskusstvo surovykh let, 86.

46. The art historian Petr Kornilov recalls how Ostroumova-Lebedeva would, in the winters of 1941–44, share with visitors copies of Mir iskusstva as a most precious gift. P. E. Kornilov, “My byli vmeste,” in Papernaia, ed., Podvig veka, 119. Ostroumova-Lebedeva's creative work during the siege made possible an open and eulogistic discussion of Mir iskusstva in the press of the time; see P. Kornilov, “Po masterskim leningradskikh khudozhnikov: Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva,” Leningrad, no. 7 (1943): 8–9. Kornilov writes: “What people surrounded Ostroumova! She is especially proud to have belonged to the Mir iskusstva group.” In the same article, dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of Ostroumova- Lebedeva's career, Kornilov mentions that though during the siege the artist “ran out of drying oil, she still uses the same set of gravers she has always used,” thus emphasizing that unity of content is inalienable from formal unity. Ostroumova-Lebedeva's view of the city became emblematic and decisively influenced such siege artists as V. Morozov and N. Pavlov.

47. S. Smirnov-Kordobskii, “Pis'ma,” in Suris, ed., Bol'she, chem vospominan'ia, 340. The artists Stepan Iaremich (1869–1939) and Vladimir Grinberg (1897–1942) mentioned here strongly influenced the tradition of the Petersburg urbanscape.

48. Shklovskii, Tetiva, 42.

49. Kornilov, “My byli vmeste,” 117.

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51. Kornilov, “My byli vmeste,” 121.

52. Curiously, though in her artworks Ostroumova-Lebedeva asserted timeless peacefulness, in her diary of that time she allowed herself to indulge in the imagery of apocalyptic destruction: “I would paint this picture thus: clouds of stinking black smoke have obscured the whole earth and sky. And tongues of fire, with sparks and steam, break through and dance about. And below people swarm about.” O. Ostroumova-Lebedeva, “Diary of Anna Petrovna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, artist,” in Simmons and Perlina, eds., Writing the Siege of Leningrad, 31. Shillingovskii's interpretation of the eschatological continuity of the meaning of Petersburg during the siege was not unique. Lebedev writes in his diary: “Now as never before l can hear Jeremiah's curse: ‘For this city has been to Me a provocation of My anger and My fury from the day that they built it, even to this day!'” Lebedev, “Blokadnyi dnevnik,“ 10 April 1942.

53. Kaganov, Sankl-Petertntrg, 194–95.

54. Piranesi and his fictions of urban and historical decay held a strong fascination for the lithographers associated with Mir iskusstva. See, for instance, Betsy F. Moeller- Sally, “No Exit: Piranesi, Dore, and the Transformation of the Petersburg Myth in Mstislav Dobuzhinskii's Urban Dreams,” Russian Review 57, no. 4 (October 1998): 539–67.

55. Leningrad, no. 7 (1943).

56. During the period of the so-called Petrograd party opposition, Zinov'ev declared: “Petrograd has its unique features: it is a more proletarian city than Moscow; quite possibly, the reason for the city's present crisis lies in that enormous effort with which Petrograd would always throw itself first into battle… . We think it wrong to treat Petrograd from a simplistic, egalitarian point of view. All of Soviet Russia needs Petrograd. Russia does not need Petrograd to be just another provincial town; Russia needs Petrograd as it is, as the largest proletarian center in the whole Republic. We see two prospects for the future of Petrograd. The first is that the Republic leaves the city alone. Petrograd could be treated as a revolutionary relic. This would doom the city to a slow death. The second prospect is that the Republic, despite the grave situation, should deem the reconstruction of Petrograd its most important goal.” G. Zinov'ev, “Vstuplenie,” in Tsyperovich, G., Budushchee Petrograda (Petrograd, 1922), 2–3.Google Scholar

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59. Characteristically, Ostroumova-Lebedeva depicts the Bronze Horseman without the defensive scaffolding built for it in the autumn of 1941, despite having observed the construction thereof that August. From her description of reworking an earlier sketch we can see that this affirmation of continuity gives her strength: “I worked ecstatically, as if intoxicated. My strength is diminished, my heart isn't working properly, and my hand shakes. But as soon as I took up my instrument, I felt my old confidence right away; the first print calmed me down.” Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Avtobiograficheskie zapiski (St. Petersburg, 2003), 3:296.

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64. On the Soviet mythologizing of Leningrad for propaganda purposes, see Steven Maddox, “'Healing the Wounds': War Commemorations, Myths, and the Restoration of Leningrad's Imperial Heritage, 1941–1950” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2009).

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66. Krandievskaia, Natal'ia, Grozovyi venok (Moscow, 1985), 93.Google Scholar

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69. Ostroumova-Lebedeva's productive relationship with the genre of postcard began with her collaboration with the St. Eugenia Society at the very beginning of the twentieth century; for details, see Goscilo, “Unsaintly St. Petersburg?” 72–73.

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72. Nikitin was not only fascinated by the unique wartime beauty of his city (fascinated to the point of frequent reiteration of this viewpoint), but saw it allegorically as the work of an artist: “We all are taken by this beauty—we didn't see it in peacetime… . It's as if a great impressionist put his rays into this amazing beauty to give it all the hues of color and light.” Nikitin, “Blokadnyi dnevnik,” 127.

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77. My understanding of estrangement as one of the central aesthetic mechanisms of the siege is informed by Kirill Kobrin, “To Create a Circle and to Break It ('Siege Man's' World of Rituals),” in Andrei Zorin and Emily Van Buskirk, eds., Lydia Ginzburgs Literary Identity (Bern, forthcoming); and Emily Van Buskirk [Emili Van Baskirk], “'Samotostranenie' kak eticheskii i esteticheskii printsip v proze L. la. Ginzburg,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 81 (2006): 261–81, at magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2006/81/ba24.html (last accessed 1 March 2010).

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80. Vera Miliutina, “Rany Ermitazha,” in Papernaia, ed., Podvigveka, 66. For information on Miliutina, I used an admirably researched monograph of remarkable emotional depth:ra Miliutina, “Rany Ermitazha,” in Papernaia, ed., Podvigveka, 66. For information on Miliutina, I used an admirably researched monograph of remarkable emotional depth: Aleksandr Rozanov, ed., Vera Miliutina ionei (Moscow, 1991).

81. Vladimir Kalinin, “Velikii dukh byl vmesto kryl,” in Papernaia, ed., Podvigveka, 48, 57.

82. In the absence of actual objects of art, the frame acquired a new, higher aesthetic status within the museum space. Art historian Mariia Shcherbacheva recalls: “The frames glimmer with particular brightness against the dark-purple background of the walls. The rays of the setting sun pour through the ancient lilac windowpanes, creating remarkably subtle hues in the hall. We began collecting the most valuable frames to save them.” Mariia Shcherbacheva, “Dni blokady,” in Papernaia, ed., Podvig veka, 36.

83. Mikhail Grigor'ev, “Dnevniki,” in Suris, ed., Boishe, chem vospominariia, 75.

84. Rembrandt's ghostly presence becomes a repeated motif in topotexts evoking siege spaces. Krandievskaia spent the first winter in the company of rats—and of images allowing her to tame horror via aestheticization: “Rembrandt's half-shade near the smoldering small stove / The gopak dance of the rats, their jerking furred backs.” Krandievskaia, Grozovyi venok, 100. The desire for detachment is a crucial impetus to producing art during historical disaster. The Czech artist Alfred Kantor, who drew while at the Birkenau death camp, writes: “My commitment to drawing came out of deep instinct for self-preservation… . By taking the role of observer, I could at least for a few moments detach myself from what was going on.” Alfred Kantor, The Book of Alfred Kantor (New York, 1971), n.p.

85. Grigorii, Kaganov, Images of Space: St. Petersburg in the Visual and Verbal Arts, trans. Sidney Monas (Stanford, 1997), 150 Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

86. Miliutina, “Rany Ermitazha,” 65; Bianki, “Gorod, kotoryi pokinuli ptitsy,” 172; Mikhail Gritsenko, “Komandirovka v Leningrad,” in Brodskii et al., eds., Kliudozhniki goroda-fronta, 138.

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88. Lebedev, “Blokadnyi dnevnik,” in Brodskii et al., eds., Khudozhniki goroda-fronta, 346.

89. Griaznov, F., “Iz blokadnogo dnevnika,” Dozhivem li my do tishiny: Zapislii iz blokadnogo Leningrada (St. Petersburg, 2009), 110 Google Scholar. For discussion of the position of the spectator within the politicized discourse of Petersburg theatricality in the twentieth century, see Geldern, James von, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (Berkeley, 1993), 193–203.Google Scholar

90. Iakov Glikin, “Dnevnik,” in Papernaia, ed., Podvigveka, 296.

91. Inber, Pochti tri goda, 63.

92. Iosif Serebrianyi, “Pis'ma khudozhnika Serebrianogo iz blokadnogo Leningrada,“ Trudy gosudarstvennogo muzeia istorii Sankt-Peterburga, no. 5 (2000): 146.

93. Levina, Esfir’, “Oruzhiem arkhitektury,” Stroitel'stvo i arkhiteklura Leningrada, 1975, no. 4: 10–11.Google Scholar

94. On the use of ruins as architectural inspiration and tools for construction, see Nikolai Molok, “Capriccio, simulacra, proekt: Ruiny,” Voprosy iskusstvovedeniia, 1996, no. 2: 27–52. For fascinating reformulations of the creative aspirations embedded within representations of urban destruction, consult Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason (New York, 2006); and Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940 (Chicago, 1999).

95. Mikhail Morozov, “Voennye grani arkhitektury,” in Papernaia, ed., Podvig veha, 306.

96. Schonle, Andreas, “Ruins and History: Observations on Russian Approaches to Destruction and Decay,” Slavic Revieiu 65, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 649.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In his forthcoming monograph on the meaning of ruins in Russian culture, “Architecture of Oblivion: Ruins and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia,” Schonle dedicates a whole chapter to the representation of ruins during the siege. According to his reading, however, the ruin served then as a grim sign of presentness or a marker for the future reconstruction, while I focus on the images of ruins that signify the atemporality of the besieged city.

97. Gritsenko, “Komandirovka v Leningrad,” 149. This excitement is akin to the reaction of the British architect and artist Hugh Casson, who worked in the Camouflage Service during the war: “The connection of camouflage with beauty is purely coincidental, its only raison d'etre is to conceal effectively, yet to see a camouflaged building through a grey November morning or aflame in the angry light of a June sunset is to receive a tremendous visual thrill from the flow of its fantastic patterns and strange colours.” Hugh Casson, “Art by Accident,” Architectural Review (September 1944): 64.

98. Lebedev, “Blokadnyi dnevnik,” 149.

99. Ibid., 358.

100. Tat'iana Glebova, “Risovat’ kak letopisets: Stranitsy blokadnogo dnevnika,” Iskusstvo Leningrada, 1990, no. 2: 29.

101. Bianki, “Gorod, kotoryi pokinuli ptitsy,” 168.